I will probably wrote one day about the folklore in SEO about the colour of the hats (white hats follow Google guidelines, black hats don’t, and grey hats are neutral), anyway the goal of my post is to present this infographic by seomoz. The original post is here. I won’t discuss about the graphic, but I’m pretty sure you can guess from it that the author (randfish, « a self-proclaimed professional white-hat SEO« ) is not a big fan of black hat techniques.

Here is a brute force copy of a part of the call for papers for WWW2010, probably the most famous conference in the field. The complete call for papers is here. WWW2010, the premier international conference on Web research, calls for outstanding submissions along the following tracks: Original and creative research papers, theoretical and/or practical “Application and experience” papers involving novel, large, deployed systems Tutorial proposals on any topic of interest to the community Workshop proposals on any topic that is strongly related to WWW, but too nascent to cover thoroughly in the main conference Demonstrations of potentially high-impact, innovative […]

This is the last of the three posts about recommendation systems, the first can be found here, the second here. In order to validate the effectiveness of our approach we decided to make an experiment with actual products and users. For this purpose we collected from a french medias reviews website krinein a sample of 4400 movies.  From these 4400 movies, we selected uniformly at random 160 of them. This was the data set for our experiment. We then extract uniformly at random from this data set 9 movies. These 9 movies were our witness products set. Our methodology was […]

This is the second post about recommendation systems, the first one can be found here. It is pretty obvious that the goal of a recommendation system is to provide users with « good » products. I am going to first introduce our notations and then explain what is a good recommendation in our framework. In the work done with Sebastien hemon and Thomas Largillier, we consider that users belong to a set $latex \mathcal{U} = \{ u_{1} \cdots u_{m} \}$ of $latex m$ distinct users and that products come from $latex \mathcal{P} =\{ p_{1} \cdots p_{n} \}$, a set of $latex n$ […]

This post is highly inspired from the introduction of a research paper, written by Sébastien Hémon, Thomas Largillier and myself, entitled Partial ranking of products for recommendation systems. Recommending products to customers is a field far older than computer science.  With the tremendous increase of the commercial potential of the e-commerce it has become of the utmost importance to perform well in this field.  Moreover, companies have now the ability to store information about consumption habits of customer: their previous purchases, their tastes. They also have access to information that often allows to cluster customers into communities that share some […]

The category Nice infographics is here to present nice infographics (no kidding!) without comments. I found this one one a french blog, it presents the growth of Internet (click on the image to enlarge it).

Jose Quesada is a cognitive science researcher working at the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition group, Max Planck Institute, Berlin. He’s  writing about productivity and research in a blog entitled « academic productivity« . I cannot really say that I agree with what he writes in his blog. Even if he focuses on productivity in an academic environment, there is no solid justification of why being productive is important. Nevertheless Jose says on his home page:  » I express what I think it is to do conscious science in the 21st century. It may not be what most people think « . I do […]

This is the last of the 3 posts about SpotRank. In this one I show some evidence of the effiency of the method. Even with a very strong analysis of the log files, it is impossible to  judge the quality of the filtering of our method. Indeed, the algorithm consists in filtering news w.r.t. the way people vote, it is not content related. To cope with this issue we decided to gather some feedback from the users themselves.  Since an absolute judgement is impossible to obtain without a long debate on what is the quality of a website, we choose […]

In this post I give a short overview of SpotRank, an algorithm designed by Thomas Largillier, Guillaume Peyronnet and Myself. The goal of SpotRank is to offer a voting mechanism for social news website (such as Digg for instance) which is robust to manipulation attempts by malicious users. Again the post is highly inspired by our research paper. A previous post introduced social news websites and related issues. We consider that the voting system SpotRank is used by a community of users that can propose its own news (or content), that we will call spots. Any user of the community […]

This post is a part of the introduction of an academic paper coauthored by Thomas Largillier, Guillaume Peyronnet and Myself. I did some modifications, so I endorse all mistakes of this version. In the last years, the way people interact with each others on the Web has drastically changed. Web sites now provide information which is an aggregation of user-generated content, generally filtered using social recommendation methods to suggest relevant documents to users.  The most known example of such a website is Digg. This is a social news website: people share content they found on the web through the Digg […]